Necessary Lies(83)
The young men in the photographs have clean-shaven faces and short blond hair.
“William thought I shouldn’t have filmed them. I was only giving them free publicity, he said. It was better to let shit like that die out on its own.”
She waits until the smoke has formed a curl and vanishes into the air. She sniffs her brandy before taking a sip. William’s favourite drink, Anna thinks, the one she has never learned to enjoy. There is a bottle just like it in her living room in Montreal.
“Do you also think I’m obsessed? That I should stop watching?” Ursula has stubbed her cigarette half-finished, but there is still enough smoke in the air; it irritates Anna’s eyes.
“No,” Anna says. “I don’t think you should stop.” How could she say anything else? These are her own obsessions, too. Here, in this part of the world, they have all been marked for life.
When Ursula talks, pointing to more faces in the pictures, Anna takes a sip of brandy, and then another one. It burns her throat but it warms her, too. She closes her eyes and thinks that she is tired. She has been chasing her ghosts, hoping for epiphanies. This has been an impossible mission; she has hoped for too much. “It’s just round the corner,” her father used to coax her on their walks together when she was little and refused to go on. “A few more minutes. We are almost there.” That’s how he kept her going. You can get a child go a long way on false hopes.
Anna closes her eyes and lets Ursula’s voice float. The faces of hatred are all the same, she thinks. Thoughts pulsate in her head, feverish snitches of all the stories she has heard, Polish, German. K?the’s bruised face, her silence. Black spots on Babcia’s lips. Ruins.
Her head swims. She has had too much to drink, and the room is circling around her head, sometimes taking off all together. Her eyes sting; Ursula’s face and the photograph on the wall split into two separate selves, begin to swirl and rotate, before she wills them to become one again.
“Excuse me,” she says and staggers as she walks to the bathroom, trying to keep steady. Inside she washes her face and her eyes with cold water. The pink seashells on the tiles blur and swirl. Ursula’s mother chose them, she recalls, and finds it all suddenly hilarious. But the hilarity passes as quickly as it comes. To steady herself, she leans against the cool tiles. The hot, sour lump in her stomach is rising up to her throat, and she begins to vomit, clutching the white toilet seat with her hands, until her stomach feels empty, wrung out from all that lay there. When it’s over her throat feels burnt and sore, so she drinks some water from the tap the way she used to do it a long time ago, at school, her fingers interlocking, palms down, to make a trough.
“Are you all right?” she hears Ursula’s voice.
“Fine,” Anna says. She is feeling better, much better. The water tastes sweet.
“I’d better make us some coffee” Ursula says.
In the bathroom mirror Anna s eyes are reddened, her skin pale. With a cotton wad she puts on some of Ursula’s makeup, a blusher on her cheeks, a dab of powder on her nose. She can hear the music, from behind the bathroom doors, Tristan und Isolde, the Furtw?ngler recording, one of William’s favourites. He kept it right beside Beethoven’s Fifth. “Auden was right. Wagner was an absolute shit,” he would say, finger in the air, “but this is all I care about.”
There is a residue in this memory of William. Of disappointment she has learned to stifle. A memory of disappointment. William’s grant applications were routinely rejected. “Too abstract,” one of the reviewers wrote, “too derivative.”
When he stopped applying altogether, she said he was giving up too easily.
“I have all I want, Anna. What is there to fight for?”
“Recognition,” she said. “Respect.”
“It’s so convoluted. It’s politics and fashion. I’m tired of it.”
Excuses, she thought. But she didn’t tell him that. She was there to heal him, not to scratch his wounds. How often did he tell her that he had enough of it from Marilyn. From her, he wanted peace.
“As if it mattered one bit,” he would also say. Why would anyone care if he ever wrote another damn note.
“I would.”
“Why?”
What could she say to that? That she wanted to see him happy? “I am happy,” he would say, raising his head over his musical boxes, all their metal parts dismantled, spread in neat rows on a linen tea towel, sanded pieces of wood slowly absorbing the stain. “I’m happy with you. I don’t want anything else.”
“You must be hungry,” Ursula says. “It’s getting late.” Her bare feet make soft, muted pats on the floor as she moves.
While Anna was in the bathroom, Ursula has warmed up slices of pita bread, and emptied containers from a Mediterranean restaurant — tahini dip, roasted red peppers in oil, eggplant purée — into small ceramic bowls, with their shapes of fish, shells, and seahorses. Yellow, green, blue. The carrots, sliced thinly, are mixed with yoghurt, and Ursula adds a handful of fresh mint that she has chopped up and thrown into the bowl.
Ursula is right. Anna is hungry. She can feel it as soon as her teeth close on the warm slice of pita. The old feeling that Ursula’s gaze can read right through her comes back, but it no longer frightens her or makes her uneasy. It may be the brandy or the strange, impossible configuration of fate that does it, the sheer improbability of the two of them sitting across each other at a table. Or it may be something deeper, like the slow but steady pace of a mountain hike that rewards her with a stupendous view of the valley she has already passed.